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Strategic Technology Planning >> Critical Thinking

By Matt Villano

08/29/06

From improving service to the campus community, to enhancing server capacity for critical operations, schools learn that the best way to tackle mission-critical objectives is to do it via intelligent tech implementations.

The plain truth is that this very issue of Campus Technology magazine
would not exist, were it not for the recognized criticality of technology to the academic
environment. Why is it then that new tools and technologies are still being implemented
in a vacuum at some colleges and universities, with little to no regard for the
impact on the institution as a whole—even the connection to the institution’s professed
or declared mission? True excellence in technology implementation emerges when IT,
administrative, and academic leaders link IT to mission-critical institutional objectives,
investing in hardware and software to serve an explicit purpose and a distinct
population of users. Across the country, at public institutions of higher education in
New Hampshire as well as at schools like the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
Fordham University (NY), and Cornell University (NY), this is precisely the case.

The benefits of these projects are many, from improved efficiency to increased cost
savings across the board. At one institution, an investment in electronic documents
even managed to get users excited about reading reports. Still, linking IT to missioncritical
objectives is not without its challenges. Any time a system is revamped, it
takes time and energy to convince users that the change is worthwhile. Joan Tambling,
director of human resources for the University System of New Hampshire, says that
the very best approaches to tying IT to mission-critical applications incorporate innovation
with a respect for the status quo, never pushing users too far too fast.

“Projects like these take patience on
both sides,” she says. “Done correctly,
the results can be incredible.”

Innovating for HR

If any academic technologist knows
how to link IT with mission-critical
institutional objectives, it’s Tambling.
Earlier this year, she received the Fred
C. Ford Award from the College and
University Professional Association for
Human Resources,
for spearheading an innovative and costeffective
solution for the delivery of services
to university system retirees. The
solution helps meet the institutional mission
of better serving the university community
by using a web interface to offer
retiree benefits to former employees of
the University of New Hampshire, Plymouth
State University (NH), Keene
State College (NH), and Granite State
College (NH). Tambling built it to be
part of the university system’s Employee
Assistance Program (EAP).

Originally, the initiative stemmed
from a human resources effort to offer
retiree benefits on a much more selfservice
basis. For years, the New Hampshire
system had handled most retiree
inquiries over the phone. Then, over the
course of the 2002-2003 school year,
Tambling set out to quantify just how
much time her staff members were
spending on the phone with retirees.
This investigation discovered that the
benefits staff of 5.5 people—many of
whom had other responsibilities elsewhere
in the department—was spending
upwards of 800 hours per year helping
retirees. To make matters worse, the
study revealed that of 1,200 retirees in
the system, HR staffers never managed
to serve more than 20 percent.

“We are the Human Resources department,
not a help desk,” says Tambling.
“It was clear something had to change.”

TECH INITIATIVE TIP

The very best approaches to tying IT to mission-critical applications incorporate innovation with a respect for the status quo, never pushing users too far too fast.

Realizing that her HR team needed
assistance in providing the level of expertise
and customer service that retirees
deserved, Tambling set out to find a vendor
partner to help transform the system.
Ultimately, that partner turned out
to be PacifiCare,
the company that was handling the university
system’s EAP benefits in the
first place. Together, the entities created
a comprehensive plan to provide retirees
with top-notch service and assistance,
including phone and web access to
information and resources, in-person
consultations, referrals to financial
planners, eldercare services, and workshops
on timely topics related to retirement
services. All of these offerings are
pulled together in a web portal.

Taking Faculty to TACC

IN THE ACADEMIC ENVIRONMENT, education clearly is the
most mission-critical objective of them all.With this in mind,
officials at the University of Utah launched the Technology
Assisted Curriculum Center (TACC) five years ago, to help
faculty members gain a better understanding of technology
and incorporate it into their lesson plans. The center—and its
measures to help faculty meet their education objectives—is
still evolving.

The center is part of the university’s library, and employs more
than 40 librarians to help educators get comfortable with technology.
In some cases, this is as simple as showing professors what kinds of databases they can make
available for a particular class. In other cases, the librarians help educators build syllabi around
one-of-a-kind software.

In addition, TACC Director Alison Regan says the center provides workshops for faculty
members three times a year. These workshops teach educators how to use everything from
Adobe’s Photoshop and Dreamweaver, to software that combats
plagiarism.

“We really provide them with whatever kind of technology support they need,” Regan says. “They
have questions; we have answers.”

Most recently, Regan says the office added a streaming media division, designed to help teach
faculty members how to digitize video and stream it over the internet. She notes that once TACC
librarians have digitized the video, they put it behind a password-protected website to comply with
copyright laws.

So far, the new approach has worked
wonders. Tambling says that in
addition to reducing her benefits
staff by a quarter of an employee,
the university system has saved
$25,000 annually on the cost of its
EAP. More importantly, for the
first time Tambling and her colleagues
feel like they’re delivering
exactly what their retirees
want. Of course, there were a few
bumps in the road: Some retirees, for
instance, were hesitant at first to pass
along personal information to a thirdparty
provider. But Tambling says that
former system employees got over these
fears in no time, and many of them have
said they couldn’t imagine having their
benefits handled any other way.

“What we have now is one little step
from where we were,” she points out, “but
for us, because we improved such a critical
application for our department and the
system as a whole, it feels like something
huge, and that’s all that counts.”

Virtual Tools

Servers always present a double-edged
problem for colleges and universities.
On one hand, in order to offer missioncritical
functions such as content management,
ERP, and more, schools must
invest in literally dozens of servers in
order to do the job right. On the other
hand, multiple server investments can
be hefty, stretching already thin IT budgets
even tighter. At the University of
Wisconsin Medical Foundation, part of the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, technologists had
faced this dilemma for years. Finally, in
January 2006, Network Analyst Troy
Frank and his colleagues came up with
a solution to the problem once and for
all: virtualization.

TECH INITIATIVE TIP

Don’t just think "overhaul." Even a small improvement can make a huge difference, if it’s made within a critical application.

Virtualization is the process of presenting
a logical grouping of computing
resources so that they can be accessed
in ways that provide benefits over the
original configuration. In the realm of
servers, this means partitioning one
physical server into a number of smaller
“virtual” ones, making the most of the
resources at hand.

At the University of Wisconsin, the
Medical Foundation turned to this strategy
earlier this year. Already, with the
help of Virtual Infrastructure from
VMware, Frank
says the foundation has consolidated 30
servers into four physical machines—a
savings of both money and floor space
in the server room.

“By virtualizing, we’re no longer
plopping down servers indiscriminately,”
he says. “Everything is part of a bigger
plan, and it all fits on a perfectly
manageable number of machines.”

Frank says that he and his colleagues
haven’t sat down to figure out what kind
of money they’re saving on hardware
costs by moving to virtualization, but he
notes that each of the four VMware
servers they purchased cost $5,000
apiece. He estimates the foundation probably
has saved on utility costs as well,
since it is powering and cooling fewer
servers than ever before. And he points
out that another area where the foundation
likely has saved money is staffing: In
the past, a group of five or six technicians
managed the server farm; today the
machines are handled by one full-time
employee and one part-timer who fills in
when the department needs him.

Down the road, Frank predicts the
foundation will move most of its remaining
150 servers into the virtual architecture.
One potential problem is bandwidth;
depending on the preexisting workload
of a particular server, not every piece of
hardware is a good candidate for virtualization.
Because every virtual server on
one machine is sharing resources such as
memory and disk space, Frank and his
colleagues say they must be careful not to
overburden any one entity. Their golden
rule: Don’t virtualize heavy-duty servers
that need dual- or quad-processing power
unless they have 4GB of memory to
access at any time.

“We can’t just virtualize everything,”
says Frank. “We know that in order to get
the best performance out of the technology
we have, we need to be smart about
how we consolidate functions into one.”

Locking Down a Network

At Fordham University, technologists
recently turned to technology to shore
up the school’s network defense—a critical
objective for administrators there.
In 2001, a staff shortage in the Information
Technology Services (ITS) department
had made it difficult to monitor
the university’s systems, particularly
during the overnight hours. Then, when
network outages did occur, ITS
resources could not provide immediate
notification of the problem. Instead,
department officials had to wait until
morning to identify and correct any
issues. This delayed and reactive
approach to addressing IT problems
simply was not good enough, administrators
decided; Fordham needed a solution
to augment capabilities and deliver
more proactive, efficient service.

As is so often the case, in trying to
address the difficulties resulting from
minimal staff support, ITS encountered
an additional setback: cost. As a nonprofit
entity, Fordham could not afford
an expensive solution. So, officials were
in need of a reliable web performance
testing and monitoring solution that
could also offer good value in terms of
cost and customer service. According to
Jason Benedict, director of computer
services and operations, ITS required a
solution that could serve as an “extra
pair of eyes” when the team was not
available. They would need it to keep
track of the performance of the Fordham
network servers, some of which were
housed on campuses that were miles
apart from one another.

TECH INITIATIVE TIP

Instead of focusing only on technology investment and savings, look at potential savings in staff numbers, energy usage, even real estate.

“Those servers are critical to everything
we do,” he says. “We couldn’t hire
anybody else [to manage them], but we
needed a cost-effective way to make
sure they always did what we wanted
them to do.”

The solution came in the form of monitoring
products from AlertSite. These tools helped to monitor all Fordham sites and applications,
performing regular tests to ensure
that academic grading, course registration,
and university e-mail systems all
were responsive and functioning. The
tool’s diagnostic capabilities were also
essential in distinguishing between
campuswide network issues and individual
connectivity problems. In addition,
AlertSite supplemented these
functions with timely and detailed notifications
via e-mail and text message
that made the ITS staff immediately
aware of the type and severity of any
network problem.

The alerts helped Fordham technologists
immediately determine when
problems warranted further investigation.
On several occasions, AlertSite
staffers phoned the ITS team to make
sure they had seen the alerts, particularly
when they felt ITS department personnel
were not responding quickly
enough. Benedict says these AlertSite
services were important to keeping
mission-critical Fordham University
applications functioning at peak performance
24 hours a day, seven days a
week. The continual monitoring also
meets a third ITS need, in the form of
compiling detailed reports that document
network uptime and provide a
clear historical record of the system’s
overall performance.

“These tools are tireless responders—
they don’t take vacation, they don’t get
sick,” says Benedict. “I could do it all,
but probably for a lot more money. With
that in mind, this just makes sense.”

Digitizing Reports

Up the New York State Thruway at Cornell
University, where the Information
Technology department is commissioned
with improving business intelligence
and the access to it, officials have
turned to technology to help them handle
a multitude of internal IT department
reports—more than 600 copies of
paper-based business plans, strategic
plans, and annual reports that were costing
the institution hundreds of thousands
of dollars in printing costs each
year. Bob Bourdeau, assistant director
of marketing for the university’s IT
department, says his colleagues playfully
refer to these reports as “the triad,”
and notes that after years of spending
time and money publishing triad hard
copies, they started looking for ways to
update the process late last year.

Cornell technologists found what
they were looking for in Digital Flip
ePublishing solutions from E-Book
Systems. The
offering converts all of the paper reports
into electronic versions that users can
access with special
readers that
enable them to
peruse the documents
by “flipping”
from one
page to the next.
(The technology is also serving a growing
market of electronic magazines and
catalogs.)

TECH INITIATIVE TIP

Cultures must change in order for technology change to be adopted and make a mission-critical difference: Don’t underestimate the importance of internal marketing to drive that change.

To access the electronic documents, a
user simply g'es to the IT department’s
home page, downloads the vendor’s
FlipViewer or Mac FlipViewer software,
and installs the plug-in software
on his or her personal computer. Once
the web-based software is on the
machine, Bourdeau says that user never
has to download the program again.
“It’s critical for us to get this information
into the hands of our users,” he
explains. “The fact that our people can
download the viewer and read these
documents electronically, without ever
having to think about a printed page, is
definitely a step in the right direction.”

According to Bourdeau, his department
purchased a license that allows the
school to print up to 400 pages per document.
Once the department exceeds the
400-page limit, it must pay a modest
per-page fee. While Bourdeau declines
to reveal how much the new system cost,
he says that it is “40 to 50 percent less”
than what the school was paying to print
the triad of reports on paper every year.
The marketing officer adds that at a
time when issues such as global warming
have put a spotlight on the health of
the environment, Cornell’s IT department
also has used the technology to
reduce paper usage, moving closer to
what many administrators commonly
refer to as a “paperless” environment.

Still, this transformation has not been
without challenges. For starters, while
E-Book Systems boasts the ability to
convert files from Adobe PDF, Page-
Maker, Quark, and Microsoft Word into
the online page-flipping format, Bourdeau
says that some of the conversions
require additional formatting. On top of
this, getting users to embrace the switch
in the first place was difficult. Because
so many of his
colleagues were
accustomed to
accessing and
reading reports
on paper, Bourdeau
notes that
changing these habits took a good deal
of cajoling and internal marketing. In
the end, however, just about every member
of Cornell’s IT department has
embraced the change.

“People thought they liked the old
way, but now they can’t believe we’ve
ever done anything else,” says Bourdeau,
who suggests that at some point,
Cornell may consider switching all of
its mission-critical reports to digital distribution.
“Clearly, this is one of those
cases where technology has made it easier
for everyone.”